


An Exercise in Proximity

by moodiful819



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: All aboard the Feels train, Angst, Elevator Sex, F/M, Face-Sitting, Gratuitous Smut, Height Differences, Hurt/Comfort, Kylo Ren Angst, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, Loss of Virginity, Oral Sex, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Wall Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-16 23:25:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13646607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodiful819/pseuds/moodiful819
Summary: One year after she leaves him on Crait, Rey gets the drop on Kylo in an elevator of all places.





	An Exercise in Proximity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Solia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solia/gifts).



> For the prompts of:
> 
> “Prompt 1: elevator smut  
> Prompt 2: ForceTime smut/feels, with guilt
> 
> I like: Kylo and Rey frustrated by persistence of Force bond, not-quite touching, UST, kissing against walls, vulnerable Kylo covering his feelings up with anger and acting out, slightly starstruck conflicted Rey, height difference, Renperor Kylo”
> 
> I hope you like it!

She gets the drop on him in an elevator of all places.

He is on his way back to his chambers. The idea he has to take an elevator back to his own room is ridiculous, he thinks. He’s a ruler, yes, but he’s never had the taste for opulence. He prefers pragmatism—but Hux insisted and it was better to give in than waste his time.

The thought passes quickly into regret. He is aware of the irony—stabbing, piercing and biting its way through his heart. There’s bitterness too. And anger. But all that comes out is soft and tender.

“Hello Rey,” he greets.

“Hello Ben,” she returns. He draws breath in deeply through his nose, feels it wash over him in a wave of relief and nostalgia. She remembers; she still has hope to turn him.

But the anger, the hurt returns. They are, after all, still at war—and the memories of what happened in Snoke’s chamber room are still fresh behind his eyes, even after a full year.

“Have you come to beg for my soul? Or have you finally come to your senses and come to surrender?” he sneers. He’s a busy man, but the Force-forsaken elevator ride is 8 minutes long. He has time to kill—even if it is to just watch her beg and plead for him to return to the light. The latter option, he knows will never come.

But still, he hopes. She’s taught him to hope again—and he hates her for it.

“I came to see you,” she answers. _And he hopes. He hopes…_

“And now you have. Now go.”

She frowns, and it reminds him of a rising moon his father showed him once as a child, solemn and beautiful. “Is that really all you have to say to me, Ben? After all this time?”

“And is this all you want to do with me? Gawk at your enemy and mock him?” He wanted to tear his hair out. Every time he faces her, he could feel himself regressing—feel himself becoming younger and acting like it. He doesn’t have time for this, and snorts derisively. “I have an empire to run.”

“No,” she replies. “I just wanted to see how you were faring. Your mother misses you.”

And then, softer, quieter, she adds, “I miss you.”

He feels the shriveled mass of his heart flutter in his chest, and he crushes it with the might of a practiced hand. “Do you now?” he asks warily.

She hesitates, bites her lip like she always does when she’s nervous. Drawn to it, he unconsciously steps closer to her until they’re toe to toe. He’d hate to know the look on his face right now, but thankfully the lights in here are dim and he can only see shadows in her eyes.

“You look well for someone plotting the demise of the galaxy.”

He smirks. “You sound mildly impressed.”

“I’m seeing what it’s like to run a Resistance army. I can only imagine what it is like to run an empire.”

“It’s...difficult,” he confesses. In the back of his mind, gears whir without rest. There had been meetings all day and another load of them tomorrow. There are war strategies to plan, finances to keep track of, and a universe of allies and traitors to keep in mind. It is...exhausting.

It wasn’t quite the life he’d wanted for himself.

“So join us then!” she pleads. “Ben, if you hate them so much, why do you keep doing this to yourself?”

A hand shoots out, leather meeting the durasteel wall of the elevator to create a vicious dent. Against its will, the car grinds to a screeching halt and the lights flicker on and off. “Why? Why?! I’m doing this for us. Sooner or later, you’ll realize how foolish you’re being trying to fight the inevitable. I am creating a new world for us—for you—only you’re too blinded by Jedi lies to see it!”

His voice echoes against the walls of the elevator, the roar rattling his head. He is lucky no one can hear him. It is a private elevator leading to his private corridor. He’d demanded no entourage and no microphones to have access here—but there are security cameras...

With just a look, metal begins to rend and sparks shower down from the corners of the car.

Under a hail of lights, Rey looks at him sadly. If he thinks about it, it might be pity in her eyes. “Ben, why do we keep doing this to ourselves?” she asks. “We both know what we want, so why are we making the galaxy pay the price?”

She asks this honestly and he appreciates it. He’s always admired her frankness—more so given the duplicity he deals with on a daily basis with politics—but he also appreciates that she said “we.” That they can share the blame in this.

“I don’t know,” he answers. “People have always died for progress.”

She frowns—less the solemn beauty of a moon and more the vengeful crack of a planet in two—and he knows he has misspoken once more.

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it!” she shouts. “And if this”—she gestures to the wall of the car, the troopers crawling through the hallways like ants, the perfect war machine he now calls home—“is your idea of progress, I want no part of it!”

And it’s just like Crait all over again and he is watching her close the door of the Falcon— _except it’s not the Falcon this time. It’s her that’s closing off and that he’s losing her all over again and_ —

He doesn’t realize he’s apologizing until she reaches out to him. He flinches. Visibly. Scrambles back against the car like a frightened animal and nothing like the fearsome warlord he’s supposed to have been for the past year—but everything is too raw and painful and for just one second, he wishes everything would _STOP_.

She reaches out to him again, slowly, more gently this time. She coaxes him out and he can feel the tension slowly ebbing from his shoulders as he reaches towards her hand. It reminds him of that night on Ach-to, and slowly, he removes his glove once more.

Her hand is shaking. Both of them are. He feels her fingertips tremble against his and _he forgot how much smaller her hands were than his_ and—

“Do you ever wonder what would have happened to us if Luke never interrupted?” he asks.

“All the time,” she whispers as she looks at where they meet. She turns her hand slightly, watching as he follows without skipping a beat. There’s a slight thrill in her chest when she sees this. So much has changed in a year and yet so much has stayed the same.

Rey smiles at the thought and looks up to see if he feels the same…

Only to see his eyes, full of longing, looking back at her.

“Ben?” she asks.

But she’s already leaning up on her toes as he leans down to close the gap between them.

Only once before has he ever kissed someone. It was a girl at the Temple, two years older than him behind one of the pillars. He doesn’t remember much of it—there isn’t much of his past that he has not already killed and left in shallow graves—but he is sure it did not feel anything like it does right now.

There is a slight hum in this somewhere. He isn’t sure if it’s the pleasured noise he makes in his throat or if there is some harmony being struck in the Force, but he feels like his body is singing and hopes she can feel it too. It’s perhaps the one good thing left in him, and he wants her to have it.

And so he shyly presses an advance, holds her a little bit tighter and brings her a little bit closer. His back is aching from the awkward angle and so are his knees, but it’s easy to forget when she sighs and melts into him and for the first time in a while, he feels like he’s doing something right.

He doesn’t want to screw things up. It’s dangerous as it is already and he wants to pull away…

But then she makes a noise that is half-sigh and half-moan. She doesn’t even realize she’s made it, but he does and suddenly he’s less restrained. He becomes hungry, greedy—the incorrigible monster who she hates that killed his father and is willing to burn the entire galaxy down to bring her back to his side—but it’s still a part of him.

He guides her towards the wall of the car, crushes the forgotten glove on the floor with his heavy boot. He braces his weight on an arm above her head and thrills in her squeal of surprise when he licks against her mouth. The clumsiness, he can mask as excitement and hunger, and soon he doesn’t even have to pretend because she’s grabbing at his heavy clothes and trying to pull her way into him as well.

He uses his size to his advantage, cages her with his arms and towers over her until she is engulfed in his shadow. He has spent a year bonded to her with nothing to show for it. After that day on Crait, the bond was nothing more than a needling sensation in the back of his skull. This is the first time he has been able to see her since then and it’s an opportunity he is not wasting.

It seems she isn’t either because she’s just as hungry and demanding as he is. He can sense her frustration when he pulls away for air, but she’s already biting and sucking at the line of his jaw before he can even protest.

He brings a hand to her chest, palms her through her clothes as he sucks and bites at her neck. She has bindings on, but the heat of him seeps through anyway. Her nipple pokes at him through the cotton and he has the sudden, unreasonable urge to know its exact shape and color. To lave over it with his tongue and suck on it until she rips his hair out.

She must want it too because she’s tugging at the cotton strips, but she wants his mouth as well and hooks her free arm around his neck to pull him down for a kiss. He obliges readily, easily. Scoops her up and presses her flush against him as her tongue slips into his mouth and he’s drowning in her.

It’s not long before this is not enough. They don’t break their kiss, but clothes are soon shrugged and torn off. His outfit is the simpler of the two, but she’s already half out of her clothes. He’s only just undone the first few hooks on his tabard when she bites at his pulse point and sucks until his eyes roll into his head.

She’s enamoured with his chest. He remembers how she gawked through their bond all those months ago and she explores eagerly. Her tongue is already tracing the wings of his collarbone while her finger swirls over the rough trail of a still-healing scar. He lets her do what she wants—even helps her up. Grabs her and palms the meat of her behind as he pins her to the wall with his body, enjoying the pleasure of her curiosity as she licks and hums over his tendons and veins.

She sits high on his torso, buries her hands as she moans into the softness of his hair. Wrapped up by her like this, he kisses her shoulder and she squirms down to do the same…

Only for him to hiss and for her to feel the poke of something alien against her.

It is too easy to climb down from him. Ben is too wrapped up in the sensations pinging through him to notice her disentangling herself from his limbs. It’s only when he feels the cool air of the elevator car on his skin that he realizes she’s undone the front of his trousers and is slowly pulling the waistband down, watching as she slowly, hesitantly palms the length of him.

Her touch is light, unsure. In any other moment, he might have been struck by her tender shyness, the vulnerability she was showing only to him…

But it’s too teasing for his current state and he’s too close.

Reaching down, he grabs her wrist in an iron grip and firmly, reluctantly pulls it away.

“I—not yet,” he stammers between deep, gasping breaths. He thinks he might be hurting her, tells himself to let her go. But all he hears is the weakness in his voice and in his knees and in his heart and he hates himself for it.

She’s perplexed and slightly disappointed. She probably thinks it has something to do with her, and he’s determined to show her that it’s not. It’s just him and his faults like it always is.

He kisses her. Partially for distraction, but partially because he enjoys it. He likes the feel of her mouth and the freckles he is finding as he kisses down the column of her neck. She hums her pleasure and he feels her thread her fingers through his hair again as he slowly kisses his way down her bared chest.

The skin here is softer, paler. It had never occurred to him that parts of her may have rarely seen the sun and the thought that she is sharing them with him gratifies his ego in a way he’s never known before. He lingers to enjoy it—tries to savor the moment—but his hands are shaking and he thinks his palms are sweating against her sides.

Reason tries to cut through the sea of emotions. None of this should surprise him. It is his first time doing any of this, but he’d seen and heard of sex from what he’d accidentally gleaned from the minds of prisoners he’d interrogated and snippets of conversations he’d walked by.

But it is truly different to know about sex and to experience it for himself, he is finding. The things he’d brushed up against in his interrogations had never really prepared him for the warmth of two naked bodies near each other or the strange, elated nervousness twisting in his gut.

When he finally gets the nerve up to look, he is pleasantly surprised. Her nipples are darker than he’d imagined. More tan than pink. Experimentally, he runs the tip of his tongue around the perimeter of one. This close to his mouth, it occurs to him how easily she would fit in his mouth—how easy it would be to wrap his lips around her hardening nipple, and indulges in the odd, alien texture of it in his mouth.

He lets her noises and hands guide him, tries to remember things for safekeeping and later use. The sides of her breasts are less sensitive than the flesh underneath; his teeth are welcome, but only sparingly, and the fact she can not only withstand the hard suction he applies to her breasts, but demands _more_ thrills him.

But it isn’t long before his curiosity and impatience send him questing for more. He’s been able to ignore his erection so far, but the first gentle touches to her vulva has it throbbing with new life. It’s not just that she moans in surprise or that she leans into him to catch herself from the sudden sensation—it’s the shocking wetness, the softness he finds there.

It’s inquisitiveness that drives his fingers to probe and trace the shape of her, but it’s something more primal that moves them inside of her and swirls his thumb against her hardening clitoris. He faintly recalls the stolen memories of others, slowly adds more fingers to help stretch her for what is about to come. He breathes in her heavy pants as she coos against the intrusion of his fingers and feels the slight rock of her hips into his hand.

Making sure she is watching him, he kneels down in front of her, nudges her legs further apart, and leans forward to swipe at her with his tongue.

The reaction is instantaneous as she jerks forward, winded by pleasure. Her hands grip into his hair like harpy talons, bordering on painful, but he revels in it. Pulls her more securely onto his mouth until he’s right under her and swirls the point of his tongue against the sensitive bundle of nerves he’s found. He can feel her thighs quake on either side of his head and holds onto her tightly as he stretches his jaw to lap at her hole.

She thrashes in his arms, feels her overwhelmed by her own orgasm. There’s a faint burst of pride as she rides his face with abandonment and he coaxes her down gently from her high with languid movements of his tongue. He is still getting used to the taste of her, alien and odd. He tells himself he’ll get used it over time—vows to himself there will be a next time as he sets about stoking the flames of her desire once more.

He’s learning the intimacy of her body, the different meanings in her fingers and her sighs. She grips his hair like reins on an animal, leading him to where he needs to go, and the heat of her bleeds into his skin.

He is soft and malleable in her hands, happy to kiss and stroke the softness of her here for as long as she’ll let him. Despite the ache in his jaw, he keeps an even pace, and on a whim, increases the pressure of his tongue.

The effect is instantaneous. Grabbing the sides of his head, words slur out of her as she keeps him there to ride his face. Swirling her hips, she grinds her clit against his nose as he laps hungrily at her entrance, rocking against his mouth with abandon. _She is so close..._

She moans her displeasure as he pulls away. His face is flushed and slick with her wetness. He wonders if she can see it glistening in what is left of the elevator car’s light. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t really care at this moment as his erection throbs and aches and he grips the underside of her knee.

Lifting one of her legs, he pulls it over his hip as he guides himself to slowly sink into her.

He cannot stop looking as he watches them join. He can’t quite describe the feeling of it, can only let himself rest his forehead on her shoulder as he groans at the pleasure of being inside her body. Everything about this is strange and foreign, but he loves it. He loves her, he realizes.

When he thinks he can finally stop shaking, he pulls back to look at her and see how she is faring. He wonders if he looks like that, starstruck and awed by the feeling of their bodies united. Shyly, he kisses her and the chasteness of it is both ironic and sweet.

Slowly, he begins to rock his hips against hers. The texture of their union changes and she shifts accordingly. Hooks her leg over his hip more firmly. Cradles his jaw as she slips his tongue in her mouth. He can feel her blush burn his cheek as she tries to mold herself to him, angling her hips to draw him in further.

When he feels her hook her other leg around him, his hands move instinctively to catch her by the curve of her bottom. She sinks further onto him instantly and he shudders as his fingers dig into the toned muscle filling his palms.

Grasping onto his shoulders and back, she pulls back from the kiss to moan into his ear. _“More.”_

He gives into her demand without thought. Presses her back against the cold durasteel walls and hammers into her as fast as their bodies allow. Sweat slickens their skin, plasters their hair to their faces. His lungs burn with exertion. He’s clutching her curves so tightly, he’s probably leaving purple crescent moons—but she’s riding him faster, raking his back and thrusting hard against him. Part of him worries for the skin of her back, if the slotted vents are carving into her flesh and leaving her raw…

— _But she’s clutching the back of his neck and crying out his name and all he can think about is the burning in his chest and in his loins and her tighttighttighttight—_

The event horizon hits her first. Rips through her and tears her apart until she’s arching straight off the wall and smothering him with her neck. It feels like she’s a part of him. That they’ll always be connected like this together, and he clutches her tight as the light rips through him as well…

But not soon enough. Even through the bliss of his climax, he can already feel her body melting away in his hands—bit by bit, star by star. By the time he regains feeling in his bones again, he finds himself sunk onto his haunches as trails of semen dribble down a bare durasteel wall. The force bond connection has shorted out; he is alone.

He burns again, this time with anger. He’s so thick with heat that he is surprised he does not boil inside out from the magma in his veins.

With a cold determination, he rights his clothes with short, rigid movements. Gloves are pulled back on; the front of his tabard is locked shut. Pulling up his pants, he doesn’t bother with the button or fly and merely tucks himself in for the slightest bit of decency before flipping the switch on his saber.

Walking to the side of the car, glazed red with the light of his sword, he carves a hole for himself. With a simple push, the metal breaks off and Kylo crouches through the opening into an empty maintenance shaft.

Pulling the last of his cape through with him, Kylo takes one last look through the hole at the elevator car and reaches towards it with an open hand. The metal is smooth; its insides are still warm with their breath...

It crushes in his fist like paper.

With a deft movement, he severs the cables supporting it and sends it hurling down the shaft, watching as it shrieks and screams before exploding in a burst of smoke and sparks miles below.

Pulling himself through the maintenance shaft, he kicks open the first vent he sees and drops into a hallway. Footsteps click through, and a petty officer has the misfortune of rounding the corner into his path.

With a yelp, he freezes and leaps into a panicked salute. “M-my lord?” If he notices the Supreme Leader’s state of undress, he wisely keeps his mouth shut about it, even if his eyes bulge from their sockets.

“Maintenance. New elevator. _Now,”_ Kylo snarls, and quickly stalks off towards his chambers.


End file.
